Fiction, Games, and Game Design

GURPS Character Creator

If you have ever had trouble with the math of GURPS’ character creation process, or needed to make multiple characters in little time, or just wanted to play with a character’s numbers without erasing a hole though the page, then my GURPS character creator is for you. It does all of the math for you, including applying the final modifiers to advantages and disadvantages, and calculating the final skill level for techniques.

There are detailed instructions on the first tab and on other sheets as needed (aided by examples), but here’s a summary:

“Basics” is where you put in your character’s base attributes as well as how many points you have to spend.

On “Ads” and “Disads” list all of your advantages and disadvantages, as well as their base costs and total modifiers. The sheet will then calculate the final costs.

On the “Skills” sheet it is vital that you spell things carefully since it is used as a lookup table by “Techs”. For each skill you also specify what attribute it is tied to, its difficulty, and what relative skill level you want. The spreadsheet will then calculate the final cost of each skill, as well as its final value. The next version will also include space for you to specify any modifiers to a skill (such as Combat Reflexes to Quick Draw).

“Techs” does the same for techniques, but instead of looking up the associated attribute, it finds the associated skill on “Skills”. that’s why the spelling of skill names is so important.

“Gear” should be self-explanatory. Simply list any equipment your character buys, along with its cost and weight, which the spreadsheet will total for you. The character creator does not include a database of equipment because that would be a copyright infringement.

Speaking of copyrights: due to not wanting to step upon Steve Jackson’s toes, and simply because there are hundreds upon hundreds of GURPS books available, the spreadsheet contains no actual skills, advantages, or any other content other than a small subset of the freely-available GURPS Lite, so you will also need whichever books you are using for your campaign.

Like all of my trpg aids, I built this in OpenOffice (AOO 4, to be precise), so I can’t guarantee it will work in other spreadsheet programs, but it should work in StarOffice’s other descendants (I wrote previously about the pros and cons of LibreOffice vs Apache OpenOffice, but there are several other derivatives as well). Normally it wouldn’t be an issue since the very few things I don’t upload as PDFs are relatively simple, but this thing is the second most complicated spreadsheet I have ever created; the first being my still-in-progress D&D 5e version. I simply don’t have the time to thoroughly test it in all of StarOffice’s children, so if you do use one of the other OO variants, please let me how well it works – especially if part of it doesn’t.

Also in common with my other aids is the fact that I built it, with input from my wife, specifically for our use, and don’t seek input from others. But in this case, instead of simply offering it up to the world for people to use or not as they please, this time I would like your feedback. Naturally, I need to know about any bugs or formula errors immediately so I can fix them. But I’d also like to know which parts of it you do and don’t like, as well as suggestions for improvements. Bear in mind, however, that this is version 1.0, and 2.0 is about half done.

One of the major changes is cosmetic. As it stands, “Usage” and “Basics” don’t even look like they’re part of the same document as the rest, so I’m making everything easier to read while giving the whole thing a facelift. Another small yet big change is that I somehow neglected to separate out CP spent to raise BS and BM from modifiers to them, so it ends up charging you CP a second time for any modifiers you list. That has already been remedied, so all of the major mechanical issues should now be dealt with. The only other mechanical change I’m planning at this time is to repeat the character’s BL on the gear tab. I may also include there the specified TL’s starting wealth, but providing a way to modify it for Wealth will just needlessly clutter up the sheet for most characters, so I will likely instead include a box where you can specify the character’s starting wealth, and the spreadsheet will keep a running total and tell you how much you have left to spend.